Reporting the incident to London, Butler said, “I have no doubt that cases of rough usage by police have occurred in Johannesburg; but we must bear in mind that the town is probably the most corrupt, immoral, and untruthful assemblage of beings at present in the world.” He was not the only one with such an unflattering opinion. J. A. Hobson, a keen observer of the scene there, wrote: “As for general liberty and even license of conduct, it existed nowhere if not in Johannesburg. Every luxury of life, every extravagance of behaviour, every form of private vice flourished unchecked; every man and woman (except Kaffirs, who do the work and don’t count) said and did what seemed good in his or her own eyes.” Even Chamberlain characterized Johannesburgers as “a lot of cowardly, selfish blatant speculators who would sell their souls to have the power of rigging the market.”
The Jews of Johannesburg were flourishing and in general did not join with other uitlanders in complaining to the government, but Butler suspected them of being at the root of the troublemaking, and in a dispatch to the War Office he wrote: “If the Jews were out of the question, it would be easy enough to come to an agreement; but they are apparently intent upon plunging the country into civil strife.” This was also the view of Hilaire Belloc, who said that the war was “openly and undeniably provoked and promoted by Jewish interests in South Africa.”
Jews had indeed flocked to the Transvaal from all parts of Europe—about half came from Germany or Central Europe—and Johannesburg boasted three synagogues. Many were poor but managed to establish themselves in businesses and trades, performing valuable functions outside the competence of the Boers in the urban life that sprang up in the boom town that was Johannesburg. Few, however, took any part in the agitation or signed their names to the many complaints sent to the British high commissioner. Those from Central Europe (it was thought amusing by the uitlanders to call these “Peruvians”) had never enjoyed any political rights in their home countries, and they found the Boers’ almost complete lack of anti-Semitism refreshing. Some even sent declarations of support to Kruger, disassociating themselves from the clamouring of the other uitlanders.
Milner was not completely successful in England; in spite of his best efforts he had not entirely convinced Chamberlain and his colleagues that war was inevitable. On 8 May 1896 Chamberlain had told the House of Commons:
A war in South Africa would be one of the most serious wars that could possibly be waged. It would be in the nature of a civil war. It would be a long war, and a costly war, and, as I have pointed out already, it would leave behind it the embers of a strife which I believe generations would be hardly long enough to extinguish.3
He was, of course, absolutely right, and it was unfortunate that three years later Milner was able to persuade him to change his views.
Chamberlain, sympathetic to Milner’s views but afraid that the British public was not yet prepared for war, asked him to sum up the situation and his views in a dispatch which might be made public. Milner did so in a long telegram which L. S. Amery called “one of the most masterly State documents ever penned.” It became famous as the “Helots Dispatch”:
It seems a paradox but it is true that the only effective way of protecting our subjects is, to help them to cease to be our subjects.... It is idle to talk of peace and unity.... The case for intervention is overwhelming.... The spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots, constantly chafing under undoubted grievances, and calling vainly to Her Majesty’s Government for redress, does steadily undermine the influence and reputation of Great Britain and the respect for the British Government within its own dominions.
The Helots Dispatch reached Chamberlain on 5 May 1899, but it was not immediately released. M. T. Steyn, president of the Orange Free State, and William P. Schreiner, prime minister of Cape Colony, proposed that Milner and Kruger meet face to face at Bloemfontein, the Free State capital; Chamberlain thought this an excellent idea; Milner was less enthusiastic but could hardly refuse. He had no skill in diplomacy, or at least no taste for it. Just before leaving Cape Town for Bloemfontein he wrote: “My view has been and still is ... that if we are perfectly determined we shall win without a fight or with a mere apology for one.”
The conference lasted only from 31 May until 5 June. Facing Milner across the table was Paul Kruger, described by Henry M. Stanley, who had met him a few months before, as “a Boer Machiavelli, astute and bigoted, obstinate as a mule, remarkably opinionated, vain and puffed up with the power conferred on him, vindictive, covetous and always a Boer, which means a narrow-minded and obtuse provincial of the illiterate type,” and by Kipling as “sloven, sullen, savage, secret, uncontrolled” and “cruel in the shadow, crafty in the sun.” But these were British opinions. To his own people he was a strong, resourceful leader: cunning, obstinate, and uneducated—yes, but wise in the ways of his own volk and sensitive to their needs and aspirations.
Stephanus Johannes Paulus Krüger (1825-1904), to give him his full and correct name, exhibited most of the strengths and weaknesses of his race in bold relief. Born on a farm near Venterstad in Cape Colony, he had been taken by his parents on the Great Trek and by the time he was twenty-one had seen action against the Bantu, had twice married (his first wife died young), and had settled on his own farm near Rustenburg in the Transvaal.
He was a deeply religious man, a member of the Dopper sect of the Dutch Reformed Church. The strictest of Calvinists, Doppers interpreted the Bible so literally that Kruger once assured Captain Joshua Slocum, the American circumnavigator, that the world was flat. He read nothing but the Bible, not even a newspaper; the words of the Old Testament were constantly on his lips, and all of his life he served as a lay preacher. He had had only three months of schooling and he wrote with difficulty, even forming his signature labouriously, but his mind was quick; he was shrewd and he had a remarkable memory. In the wars against the Bantu he had earned a reputation for bravery; in the internal squabbles of the early trekker republics he became renowned for his astuteness.
When in 1883, at the age of fifty-eight, he was first elected president of the Transvaal, he continued to live as he always had: he rose each morning at dawn, read his Bible, and then held a religious service for his family—he had seven daughters and nine sons. After that he sat on the front stoep of his unpretentious house in Pretoria, drinking innumerable cups of coffee, his pipe ever in his mouth, and conducted the business of the state. His people also came to him here with their agricultural and domestic problems, for he was considered wise in these matters. Gezina, his wife, kept cows and chickens, thriftily sold milk and eggs to her neighbours, and freely dispensed her great supply of home remedies for all diseases.
Kruger was a huge man with an enormous head that carried one of the world’s ugliest faces. His left thumb was gone—torn off when as a young man his gun exploded as he was shooting a rhinoceros. Stanley said that he spoke “in a voice that was like a loud gurgle” as “the great jaws and cheeks heaved and opened. His speeches sounded like sermons.” He often had a surly manner, and to some he seemed uncouth, but he had a kind of gnarled grandeur and he impressed men with his rhetoric and by his resourcefulness and strength of will.
When the conference began Kruger tried to bargain, but Milner was obdurate. He had been instructed by Chamberlain to “lay all stress on the question of the franchise,” and this he did by simply stating his terms —five years’ residency—and refusing to budge. Kruger told him: “I understand from His Excellency’s arguments that if I do not give the whole management of my land and government to strangers there is nothing to be done.... I am not ready to hand over my country to strangers.” Milner simply sat cold, impassive, insistent.
President Steyn did everything in his power to keep the conference going and to prevent a deadlock. Kruger offered to ask the volksraad to reduce the residency requirement from fourteen years to seven. To Steyn this seemed a major concession, and he had a private talk with Milner in an attempt to persuad
e him to accept this and take up other issues—the teaching of English in the schools, and customs, postal, and railway unions—but Milner was so uncompromising that Steyn despaired. When he left the meeting he went directly to his office, where he sat down and ordered 2,000 Mauser rifles and a million rounds of ammunition. He was too late: war began before the arms arrived.
Chamberlain, too, was anxious for the talks to continue, and he cabled Milner that it was “of the utmost importance to put the President of the South African Republic clearly in the wrong.” But the impatient Milner had already slammed the door and closed the conference. Kruger summed it up simply: “It is my country you want.” As he drove away there were tears streaming down his rutted, homely face.
Although undoubtedly disheartened, Kruger did not cease his efforts to keep his country from plunging into war. As he told Milner he would, he went home and persuaded his volksraad to reduce the residency requirement to seven years. Seven years was not as good as five, but it was not worth going to war for the extra two years. In Britain there were sighs of relief. The Times announced that the crisis was over. No, no, no, cried Milner. There were other aspects of the case; the conditions were not as good as they appeared; the real issue was not the franchise after all but British paramountcy in South Africa. Speaking of the new franchise law in a dispatch, Milner said that “if it is enforced rigidly, there will be practically unlimited opportunities of excluding persons whom the Government considers undesirable.” Why a country should not be allowed to exclude undesirable foreigners was not explained. He now proposed a joint inquiry into Transvaal reforms. Chamberlain, following Milner’s lead, decided to ignore the Transvaal’s conciliatory gestures and released Milner’s Helots Dispatch.
The British public, even the Cabinet, had shown little interest in South Africa, but the dramatic dispatch created a sensation, and not just in Britain. The British in South Africa reacted as well. Throughout the winter months in South Africa—June, July, and August—there were anti-Boer demonstrations, public meetings, petitions, and incidents of all kinds, not only in the Transvaal, but in Natal and Cape Colony as well.
On 26 June Chamberlain gave a bellicose speech in Birmingham in which he said:
We have tried waiting, patience, and trusting to promises which were never kept. We can wait no more. It is our duty, not only to the Uitlander, but to the English throughout South Africa, to the native races, and to our own prestige in that part of the world, and to the world at large, to insist that the Transvaal falls into line with the other states in South Africa, and no longer menaces the peace and prosperity of the world.
Difficult as it may have been to see how the Transvaal was menacing the peace of the world, Chamberlain had now thrown down the gauntlet, not only to the Boers but politically to his party and particularly to his colleagues in the Cabinet. They had either to go along with him or to disown him. Since he was too powerful a political figure to be dismissed, the Cabinet reluctantly supported him. Balfour grumbled to Salisbury about Chamberlain’s “favourite method of dealing with the S. African sore . . . by the free application of irritants,” but when Chamberlain asked for troops he reluctantly agreed that they should be sent: “I cannot think it wise to allow him to goad on the Boers by his speeches, and to refuse him the means of repelling Boer attack.” Lord Salisbury, the prime minister, in a letter to Lord Lansdowne, the secretary for war, spoke of the uitlanders as “a people we despise” who were living in “territory which will bring no profit and no power to England.” The Cabinet, he complained, was committed to “act upon a moral field prepared for us by Milner and his jingo supporters.”
While Chamberlain and his supporters were preparing Britain for war, frantic efforts were being made in Pretoria to prevent it. In mid-August Jan Smuts, the twenty-nine-year-old state attorney of the Transvaal, met secretly with W. Conyngham-Greene, British agent in Pretoria, to work out new proposals. The result was an agreement on the part of the Transvaal to a five-year residency for the franchise if only Britain would agree not to interfere in future with the domestic problems of the country and to submit points in dispute to arbitration by third parties. On 28 August Chamberlain gave what he called “a qualified acceptance” to the agreement, but which was, in fact, a complete rejection; he had gone too far now to turn back. At a garden party he made a speech in which he referred to the Transvaal dribbling out reforms like a “squeezed sponge.” Milner, worried that the Transvaal might agree to all his terms, suggested to Chamberlain that Britain should now demand that the Transvaal disarm, a condition they certainly would not accept. This, at the moment, seemed too crude for Chamberlain, although he told Milner: “I dread above all the whittling away of differences until we have no casus belli left.”
Chamberlain had no cause to worry. On 8 September he sent a telegram to South Africa stating that it was the unanimous decision of the Cabinet to repudiate the claims of the Transvaal to be a sovereign international state and that Britain would not consider any proposal which appeared to acknowledge such claims. That did it. On the same date the Cabinet ordered an increase in the number of troops in South Africa to 22,000. Incredibly, although Milner and Chamberlain had been relentlessly pursuing a policy which they and all the leaders of government saw would probably lead to war, almost no provision whatever had been made to fight a war in South Africa. It was not until June that the Cape Command was even ordered to collect regimental transport.
Milner constantly urged Butler to prepare for war, but Butler had received no orders from the War Office and so had done nothing. He was later much criticised for this. A British South African named Aubrey Woolls-Sampson, who had been one of the staunchest members of the Reform Committee, devised a scheme for raising a volunteer force, but Butler objected, saying that raising such a force would only alarm the Boers still more and increase the tension. He refused to sanction it, and Milner said to him bitterly, “It can never be said, Sir William, that you precipitated a conflict with the Dutch.”
Indeed it could not. During his brief period as acting high commissioner while Milner was in England, Butler had done everything he could to dampen the rising flames of uitlander discontent, and all that he had done had met with Milner’s disapproval. When Milner returned and Butler reverted to his position as commander-in-chief, the old general tried to hold his tongue as he watched Milner pursue his provocative diplomacy, but tongue holding was not easy for him.
In his dispatches home Milner complained constantly of Butler and his “policy of obstructive pacifism.” On 14 June he wrote Chamberlain:
The General. He is too awful. He has, I believe, made his military preparations all right, but I cannot get him to make the least move or take the slightest interest.... He will wait for his W.O. orders, but till he has commands to mobilize, he will not budge an inch.... His sympathy is wholly with the other side. At the same time there is nothing to lay hold of. He never interferes with my business and is perfectly polite. But he is absolutely no use....
It was a curious situation: a diplomatist doing his best to start a war and a general doing his best to prevent it. Milner cast about desperately for an excuse to get rid of this pacifist general.
When the War Office sent Butler an order to purchase mules, asked some questions concerning supplies, and concluded by asking if he had any “observations,” Butler seized this as an excuse to air his opinion on the political situation: “I believe war between the white races . . . would be the greatest calamity that ever occurred in South Africa.” The War Office rebuked him, saying that political observations had not been requested. Milner wrote to Chamberlain: “I am sorry to say that in my opinion the strength of the General’s political opinion impairs his efficiency, whatever his military capacity.” He asked for Butler’s recall. Butler was forced to resign, and his resignation was accepted on 9 August 1899, scarcely more than a month before the beginning of the war.
As Viscount Esher later told King Edward VII: “Sir Wm met the fate of those who give u
npalatable advice. That much of the advice he gave has since proved correct, is not possibly of advantage to him in certain quarters.”
6
EVE OF WAR
The stage was now set for war. Boers and Britons were psychologically prepared for it: all had been driven to the proper state of exasperation by the futile meetings, the legal technicalities, the endless correspondence. Most men were now impatient for the talk to end and the action to begin. The Boers were maddened by Milner’s intransigence and outraged by the threat to their cherished independence; the British were swept by a tremendous surge of imperial sentiment such as they had never before experienced. Practical considerations on both sides delayed the start of hostilities for a few weeks: Britain waited for reinforcements to arrive in South Africa; the Boers waited for the spring grass to cover the veld, grass to sustain the horses and ponies of their commandos.
Both sides expected the war to be short. The Boers thought that Britain would be unwilling to accept the cost in lives and treasure necessary to subdue them, and that she would, as in 1881, back off; they underestimated the determination of the British to see the thing through this time, to conquer them once and for all. The Boers had a misplaced confidence in the intervention of European powers on their behalf if the war should last longer than a few months; the British had an ill-founded confidence in the efficacy of their army, and they underestimated both the military capacities of the Boers and their determination to resist.
Great Boer War Page 6
